Pemberley (9 page)

‘You have had the benefit of the practical knowledge and skills of Mrs Reynolds since you were a child, my dear Georgiana. She is the most charming of women; the most effective of housekeepers. Yet I own I feel sometimes a total ignoramus compared to her. Where are people to sleep, when they come? Which bedroom is suitable for my mother and which for the young bachelor Lady Catherine brings with her? What shall we eat, three times a day? Should orders be given to kill the goose? Or do we wait until the New Year? And the ball! Shall we have sherbet and wine, and how will the lemonade be procured? Will the musicians arrive on time, in case of snowfall or stormy weather? You see how my poor mind is taken up, my dear sister.'

Miss Darcy did not reply, and Elizabeth ran on: ‘I feel for my mother now that I am in charge of an establishment. I own I used
to mock her – indeed we all did – for making such a to-do over the dishes and the entertainment we offered to neighbours – and I have to say my father had a wicked tongue when it came to my mother's arrangements and the like. He would tell her to serve nothing at all to certain of the visitors, and Jane and I would laugh! But now I see that to be responsible for a house takes away a great amount of the enjoyment of life.' And here Elizabeth drew herself up and laughed. ‘How I run on! I am like Mrs Bennet in this respect too! But I know you understand – and my happiness at the understanding of your dear brother is all I could ever have hoped for. Pemberley is on so much greater a scale than Longbourn, and there is so much to learn!'

Georgiana said she was sure the staff at Pemberley would give all assistance to Elizabeth when it was needed; and she suggested further that they walk up through the wood to the tower. ‘I have not heard that you have had time to visit the tower since you came to Pemberley. We played there as children. It is a magical place for children.' Here Georgiana stopped and coloured.

‘My dear Georgiana,' said Elizabeth, for she saw that some influence had been at play on the girl, but she could not see whose, ‘I beg you not to suffer embarrassment when you talk of children in my presence. No one loves children more than I, and Nature will provide for us. I feel' – and here Elizabeth faltered, for she was unsure of Georgiana's response to a subject necessarily so intimate, but also, alas, so important to the family – ‘nay, I know, that the greater anxiety becomes in a woman when she contemplates the bearing of children, the less likely it will be that she will present her husband with a child. My sister Jane has told me this many times.'

But – ‘I had no intention of prying,' Georgiana said crossly; and now Elizabeth knew her to be in an ill humour; and ashamed, too, very probably, at her own actions of the previous day, for she had been wrong to invite Miss Bingley without the agreement of the mistress of Pemberley, and surely she knew it.

They walked up a wooded hill and soon found themselves on an eminence where a tower, designed in the days of Queen Bess and the other great Bess, of Hardwick, commanded a wide view of the landscape. Elizabeth exclaimed at the sight of Pemberley, quite small in the park from this height, and remarked that they had climbed higher than she thought. ‘Now I see the village in its entirety for the first time,' she said. ‘How well laid out it is! Your father, the late Mr Darcy, had the welfare of his workers much at heart – this much I have heard from everyone on the estate.'

‘He cared for everyone equally,' said Georgiana, who now showed some animation in her voice. ‘It was the kindness of his nature which deceived him when it came to the son of his bailiff, Mr Wickham. He gave no credence to the proposition that some are born evil and some good. He believed all could be ascribed to the nurturing of the soul, the rearing of the child. There was none like him in the country, so I have been told, and he is much mourned here.'

‘Yes, but your brother Mr Darcy is revered for his enlightened spirit also,' said Elizabeth quickly. ‘Why, I recall my first visit to Pemberley – with my aunt and uncle Gardiner, we came as tourists simply – and Mrs Reynolds, who conducted us through the house, spoke of your brother in the same vein.'

‘My brother has sins to atone for,' was all Miss Darcy would give in reply to Elizabeth's encomium. ‘Now please permit me to show you the tower. The design, as you may see, is of a four-leafed clover. If you walk round it entirely, it will become clear to you. Here it was that the imprisoned Queen of Scotland was taken, to watch the hunt as it went over that hill and down the dale.'

Elizabeth professed her interest and astonishment at the historical site and romantic associations depicted by Miss Darcy – but her mind raced and she felt her heart pound at her own insensitivity. ‘I have taken into no account that my fears for the season at Pemberley are as nothing in comparison with poor Georgiana's; I have fretted over the coming presence of Mr Wickham, certainly,
but I have not refused him entry to Pemberley, and that I should most definitely have done. The poor child! It was never said by Darcy quite how far Wickham's seduction had gone, by the time Darcy came to rescue his sister form Mrs Younge's establishment at Ramsgate – yet how she must fear and detest the vile Wickham, and how much of her affection and confidence I must myself have lost!'

Thus ran Elizabeth's thoughts, which caused her to blush dreadfully and to wish herself a thousand miles from the Scottish Queen's tower and the presence of Georgiana Darcy. As she stood, in apparent contemplation of Pemberley and its environs – her own home now, a place which she had hoped to make the home of her new sister also, and how she had betrayed that trust! – a group of children led by a young man of twenty-two or thereabouts became visible in a clearing in the wood beneath them.

‘Ah, there is Mr Gresham,' said Georgiana, who smiled and waved and received a greeting in return. The children halted and stared up at Mrs Darcy and Miss Darcy on the eminence above them.

‘The children of the men who work here,' said Elizabeth, for she felt satisfaction at recognising some of those who received her gifts in the village. ‘And who is Mr Gresham?'

‘Oh, Lizzy,' cried Georgiana, who seemed quite to have recovered her spirits, ‘I have spoiled my brother's secret! I shall tell you no more!'

‘How can Mr Gresham be Darcy's secret?' exclaimed Elizabeth, relieved in the extreme that the expected presence of her poor sister Lydia's husband Mr Wickham had not upset the girl too much. ‘I do not recall any talk of a Mr Gresham!'

‘Now you leave me no choice but to explain to you,' said Georgiana, for the young man detached himself from the group and came up through the trees nimbly, eschewing the path. ‘He will wonder that you do not already know the position he will fill at Pemberley.'

Before Georgiana had time to expound on this, Mr Gresham was standing beside them and bowing shyly to Mrs Darcy. He was come to catalogue the famous library at Pemberley, at the request of Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy. As his origins were from hereabouts – he was the son of the present bailiff at Pemberley and had been raised on the estate, receiving an education which enabled him to continue his studies at the University of Oxford – Mr Darcy had done him the considerable honour of choosing him, rather than another more experienced librarian, for the task.

‘Mr Darcy informed me, Madam, that it was your father, Mr Bennet, who had drawn his attention to the chaotic state of the library at Pemberley. It is in his memory, Mr Darcy instructs me, that he wishes a new annexe to be built, and craftsmen are even now engaged in engraving Mr Bennet's name and favourite saying – I believe it is from Ovid – in gold on the portal above the entrance to this new section of the library. Have I spoken wrongly?' Mr Gresham added in confusion, as Elizabeth turned away and wiped a tear from her eye. ‘I hope and trust, Mrs Darcy, that I have not offended in any way.'

‘Not at all,' said Elizabeth, turning and smiling at the young librarian. ‘You have inadvertently given away the secret of Mr Darcy's gift to me.'

‘But surely, Lizzy, you heard the carpenters at work all this week,' said Georgiana, laughing and taking Elizabeth's arm as they walked down the path together, Mr Gresham leaping down to rejoin the children. ‘Is it really such a surprise to you?'

Elizabeth owned that it was. ‘There is always something going on at Pemberley.'

Elizabeth's first wish, since hearing from Georgiana of the kindness and generosity of Darcy's gift to her, was to find him and thank him. How thoughtful of her feelings, how cognisant of the sense of loss of her father, whom she mourned so intensely and discreetly, a grief seen by Darcy but, from delicacy, never commented on, as she now knew – how tender in the concept of immortality bestowed on Mr Bennet by his name and most favoured sayings inscribed at Pemberley!

Elizabeth was hard pressed to recall when she had been so much moved by a gesture, from him. She resolved to lose the prejudice she felt – almost insurmountably at times – against his family, and those friends, the sisters of Charles Bingley, whom he had known before meeting her. She would forget the comment, made on more than one occasion by Miss Bingley, that a portrait of Mrs Bennet and her antecedents would prove a fine addition to the portrait gallery at Pemberley; and she would forget the tone in which this arch suggestion was made.

Darcy had designed the construction of the new wing to the library, it was now evident, to meet the time of the arrival of both their families and friends. Mrs Bennet – though Elizabeth drew back from imagining fully the effect of this tribute on her mother and the extent of her gratitude – would feel herself welcomed here, her husband's memory enshrined in the very part of the house which, at Longbourn, had caused her the greatest annoyance; and Elizabeth's eyes filled with tears of undimmed memory at the picture of her father, exasperated by his wife and younger daughters, taking refuge so constantly among his books. The marked reference to Mr Bennet's learning might keep Lady
Catherine de Bourgh from the worst excesses of superiority – so Elizabeth dreamed and hoped, at least, as she sought Darcy up and down the expanses of Pemberley – and it seemed clearer to her as she went that this might be a strong reason for the haste in preparing a new catalogue for the library, all done ‘at the request of Mr Bennet'. Her dear husband showed in this way that he would brook no continuation of the insolence and hauteur from his aunt, demonstrated both to Elizabeth and her mother on the famous occasion of her visit to Longbourn to discover Elizabeth's intentions in marrying Darcy; and to inform her that Miss de Bourgh had long been the intended bride of her cousin Fitzwilliam, a betrothal agreed with Lady Anne Darcy at the birth of Lady Catherine's daughter.

No, this must be the reason – and Elizabeth's heart gave a burst of joy – so much so, that on glimpsing Mrs Reynolds, who had some question of her preferences for the dinner on the following day, when all the party would be assembled, she took refuge in a small ante-room, seldom used, which lay between the long gallery and the library – whence her eager steps were bent – and concealed herself behind the door. There would be time enough for talk of hare soup and pheasant. Now, more than ever in all her year of marriage with Darcy, was the moment to find him and say she knew the secret of the library; that she had been blind not to have seen the work carried on there already, but had thought it simple repairs; that she had met Mr Gresham and understood that the late Mr Darcy's spirit of benevolent enlightenment, which had obtained for the odious Mr Wickham all the education and patronage he could desire, lived still in his son, this time to be rewarded by the evident honesty and sincerity of Mr Gresham. All this Elizabeth knew she must say; and, having searched everywhere for Darcy, knew also that he must be in the very sanctum designed around her father: there, fittingly, she would find him and give her thanks and expressions of everlasting affection.

Mrs Reynolds passing down the gallery beyond with a swish of skirts and jangle of keys brought Elizabeth to the entrance to the ante-room, but, as she stepped out, the door of a cabinet, an elaborate piece of furniture inlaid with oriental scenes in gold lacquer – in all probability a gift to Mr Darcy and placed in as inconspicuous a place as could be found, for he did not like the over-formal or elaborate – swung open and disgorged a load of papers on the ground at Elizabeth's feet. As it would cause more work for the servants – and Elizabeth was conscious still that her concerns in these matters would be considered laughable by great ladies such as her husband's aunt, for servants were in all respects insignificant and invisible to them – Elizabeth stooped and gathered up the letters, for such she now perceived them to be. Her surprise at first came from the freshness of the paper on which they were written; she did not think this cabinet used or visited at all. Her second sensation was one of alarm, for these were letters of a very recent nature to her husband; and, taking up the most lately written, which bore a date in October, she found herself in possession of a missive from Lady Catherine de Bourgh to her nephew, Mr Darcy. Elizabeth blushed dreadfully, and read on.

Lady Catherine presented her compliments to Mr Darcy and gave her regrets that she had perhaps been a little too outspoken on the subject of his marriage to Miss Bennet. She wished her nephew very well, and had heard from every quarter that Mrs Darcy learnt her wifely duties well and the couple gave every appearance of lasting happiness.

‘But,' and here Elizabeth's eyes stayed long on the page, ‘I must request, my dear Fitzwilliam, that you give some thought to a distant future, a future in which you will no longer be master of Pemberley. Your mother, my dear sister, spoke many times of such a time when, in the unhappy event of there being no son and heir to succeed you, the estate would pass by entail in the male line. Many times, as you may know, I tried to dissuade your father
from staying with this entail – for Sir Lewis de Bourgh had no desire for an entail of such a nature at Rosings, and we are happy that our daughter shall inherit. I need not reiterate here that my grief – and I know it would have been dear Anne's too – at your decision to marry Miss Bennet and not our daughter is un-assuaged, and it is only to be hoped that you will not come to regret your choice.